


I Will Not Say Do Not Weep

by sian22



Category: The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types
Genre: Boromir's journey, Dol Amroth, F/M, Grief and Healing, Rohan, Theodred's sacrifice, also post-honeymoon, forging new, post-betrothal, private rituals, song as a balm, supporting each other, understanding loss in times of disruption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-05-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24277936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sian22/pseuds/sian22
Summary: How do we do grief's necessary work when familiar ritual is impossible? Éowyn, in the days after Théoden's funeral, finds the lack of a service for Théodred a hurt. Her new betrothed helps her find a way to honour his sacrifice, and she, in turn, helps Faramir say goodbye, at last, to Boromir. A mediation on maps and rivers, place and time, and how grief and love are twins
Relationships: Éowyn/Faramir (Son of Denethor II)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28





	I Will Not Say Do Not Weep

**Author's Note:**

> I dedicate this to the many who, in these cruel days, must grieve and heal apart from those they love; cut off from the rituals that heal. I have to come to know this far too keenly in these slow, heavy weeks. But there is no calendar and each will have their own way to cope. As is usual, writing is mine.

Sometimes, Faramir reflected, it seemed as if his life had been meted out in maps.

There were those that guided and informed. Maps of weed-choked, dishevelled, stony refuges. Maps of long ago battles ringing ghostly in the fog. Maps of Kementari’s stars to show a Ranger’s way no matter how deep the night’s dark vault. 

These he knew and held to himself for necessity. Sky maps and blood maps. High contours and steep defiles. _This way. Not that one. No not ever there._

There were those that challenged and provoked. Stark lines that imagined where arrows would take flight. Endless files of retreating troops and snaking columns of heedless orcs. A pale light lingering and thunder in the east.

These he absorbed and tried to put away, for change was the inheritance of his times. _Inexorable. Rolling like a tide over a shingled shore and he a piece of wrack, tossed and rolled, bobbing up to the surface to take breath again._

Now, also there was a map of loss. 

_Mother. Brother. Comrades. Father._ Parts were pale blue, faded into rambling tangled skeins or the sharp green of old regret. Parts pulsed red: the new carmine that burned fierce and hot, without ceremony, banked by pain too sharp to touch. Sometimes these strayed to violet, for the Shadow could be caught in The Weaver’s nets, distilled to a darkest ink of sorrow that wrote strong and elegantly on the heart.

He knew this with a deep, sometimes groaning, unbreakable foundation. Hard won wisdom, washed by pity’s tears. _There are dragons there. And Balrogs. Behind a fence of staggered teeth._

Sometimes you could only see the path when you closed your eyes and listened well.

_My lord, you called me. I come. What does my King command?_

That map had unfolded with a flourish. Joy and a fountain ever brimming; duty and devotion and purpose unlooked for; but first there had been soft footfalls on dew heavy grass, starfired eyes and limbs of graceful willow, a spine of silvered steel. 

Dazzled, dazed, he had, with abandon, thrown away the map. Blundering through tumbling words, blindly feeling the route by long defiant instinct, lacking any light to scry the way, he had come out through Shadow, miraculously, improbably, with an entirely new Map. 

One scribed by her on his fea.

The map of courtship he fancied was made of stolen kisses. On blushing fingertips. On a single, upturned wrist. On soft lips as the welcoming wind buffeted them under a sunlit sky.

This last he cached with those that had brought succor and often solace. Charts in Minas Tirith’s archive of books that still called to his heart. Scribbles by his brother of taverns on Dol Amroth’s waterfront or Cair Andros’ sheltering bulk—tiny, perfect decorations on Gondor’s far margins. And now a bare, hesitant outline of an estate that once nestled in low, green hills. 

These were rolled slowly and with reverence, carried within to pull out and examine from all sides for their pure, liquid joy. _A garden._ _A mallorn tree_. _Perhaps even_ _nursery._

Two weeks and more it took to traverse the Great North road, to bring a King upon a golden bier home to his final rest. The Prince of Ithilien rode at his Uncle’s side and reacquainted himself with the map of happiness. Lightened limbs. Thudding heart. Distraction and daydream. 

Each shortening league brought her into sharper focus. Gold. White. Snowdrops and ripening wheat. Sunlight and starlight. Fair and strong, wiser surely than he would ever be. And Magic, all of it. But he who had seen her change in another city perched on starker stone, who had been a bulwark against a storm and felt the wild heart of passion inside the cool, pale lily, knew in the days to come that all was not entirely well. 

After the cups of celebration and welcomed bonds, after the sunrise smile just for him and heady rides through burnished fields, there were other pressing matters to snatch their time. 

He, heart like a lodestone, would search each day and find her sitting quietly on Meduseld’s far platform. Facing west, brow furrowed and face perfect, pale and cool.

It was a high summer day after weeks of warm, and yet about Éowyn was the faintest whiff of snow.

"My Love, what is it? Tell me."

He meant anything. And she believed, and so she took a breath.

"My heart feels lost. In these days and nights since we sang my Uncle to his rest, it strays. Seeks for my cousin, Théodred, who did not live to see his father healed or hear the horns of the Mark blowing at the coming of the morn. Elfhelm and Grimbold, the men arrayed with them, sang for him, they said. A rough, swift song. Of his glory and his strength, the honour of his end, but I did not see it, nor sing myself. He had no other rite. Now it feels a dream. An evil dream, and my heart grows more leaden by the day."

Her lashes sparkled with unshed tears. "You marked the Riders dirge at Uncle's feast?"

"Yes," he said, sinking down beside. The music had been slow and sonorous and moved him deeply though he did not understand.

"So should we have done for Théodred. Five days after he was cut down by Orcs, our liege and Mithrandir came up out of the grass and we were away. First to Helm's Deep and Dunharrow, and then again your country. War was abroad and we durst not sleep _._ "

He nodded gravely. "They were dark days indeed. Time was an anvil, pressing down with greater need."

"I know it," she murmured, in a low voice near to breaking, "but then I had no hope there would come a time for loss and forgetfulness. Now that it is here, the weight of it grows like a mountain stream in spate. I am tired of the heaviness; I wish to lay it down, but I do not know the way."

One tear, but that alone could shatter him.

"Éowyn. Love." _Do as I say, not as I fail to do_. He took her trembling hands and steadied them. "My grandfather once said that sorrow must be given words ere the grief that does not speak binds a heart and bids it break. Your pain is waxing cut off from the work we do great and small in gathering those that share the loss. Without it, the sense of deep wrong is real."

She looked up to catch his gaze. "You feel it also? For your brother or your father?"

"Yes," he began, but then had to gasp, sitting straighter to ease the ache that clawed suddenly at his breath. "For my brother most assuredly, but my father- that is rather different thing."

A hole. A complicated pit in which he never knew which emotion would bubble up.

There had never been a map to his father's guarded heart.

"Denethor battled more than one Enemy," he explained when he could speak again. "Despair, and loss, they dragged at him like a suit of heavy armour, but oft he used his grief as a shield against the world. Across many years his spirit shrank inside, inch by inch, for lack of hope. And her. My mother. But by his own hand he made his end, and it feels not right to disturb it now." He shook his raven head. "As for my brother." _Raucous boasts and empty flagons, flamboyant curses and ready smiles, dinted steel and song_ ; _a face more beautiful in rest even than in life._ "I know the King, and Legolas, and Gimli, sang for him. I saw, so I believe, the boat that they, with honour, laid him in; that took him down Anduin to the Sea. But a rite? No. None apart from the greater service for all that fell."

Then, because she had shared her pain, so did he. Halting and hoarse. "In truth, at the time I did not want it-the boy I was had too many memories of fear and pain, of following a silent bier along cloying, scented thoroughfares-but now, it is too late. And there is no place to touch either of their rests."

Her eyes grew dark. "And so you suffer, too. It is not fair of me to become unmoored by the loss of only one."

"Does Mandos keep a tally, like notches on post?" He shook his head again. "I cannot imagine it. The wise say that not all under Arda is fair, that we do not ask for our fates, but neither do we necessarily deserve them." A wry smile quirked for an instant. "A curious little boy, thinking of a mother he barely knew, once asked Mithrandir how the Doomsman chose to take so gay a soul, and was spectacularly, swiftly reprimanded."

"Saying?"

"That Mandos knows and remembers nearly all that was or shall be, but it is the One that made the vision. That no loss is valued more than another. Théodred was as a brother to you was he not? Where does he lie?"

"At the Fords of Isen where he and his warriors fell. Gandalf, with such of his men who could be spared, raised a mound girt with spears to guard his rest. Why do you ask?"

Not so far and yet just far enough.

Faramir arose and held out a hand to the unsettled fingers that twisted in her skirts. "We have work to do, my lady. A ceremony need not be great and august with horns and feasting in the Hall, but it assuredly must be yours." He smiled. "Éowyn, will you come?"

"To the Fords?"

"Just for a day. And in such time that you may return and send your guests off with the stirrup-cup."

It was the right thing to say.

In the soft, gold waning of the afternoon, a new flush painted on her cheek.

"My lord, I will."

~~~000~~~

They rode out on a morning finding its way fitfully past banks of iron cloud, the wind brushing waves through a wide sweet sea of wheaten gold.

Éomer had suffered to give them leave, though not without an escort that hung discretely back. They rode fast and steadily, gave their mounts their head, making swift time on the clear, straight run of the western road. By day they rode past pasture thick with bloom and shoals of milkweed soon to burst; at night they camped beside snow-fed crystal streams and below the arcing starry showers from Menelmacar's great bow. A delight, despite their somber errand.

After two long days, they came to the broad, open vale that stretched between Hithaeglir's misty feet and the shoulders of Ered Nimrais's looming bulk. Mithros, Faramir's great grey stallion, picked his way down the road that began to fall on long slopes down to where the Isen spread in stony shoals between its grassy terraces. This was not the mighty Anduin. In the flat land of the Gap, the river slowed and turned to west, broadening and shallowing; braiding its groaning load of silt and gravel into flat hillocks and long turved islets. It was spare but still graceful to the eye: sedge and valerian, the lilac haze of thyme, nodding umbels of shy pink beardtongue all anchored in the talus crevices.

And on the higher eyots golden daisy and towering spires of boneset sailed.

Except for the largest that nestled between two arms of the river.

They began to cross the Ford. From behind, Faramir heard Éowyn's Wyndfola splash across the rippled flats. The sound startled a small flock of starlings that made a map of raven and blue against the sky.

They reached the eyot and left the horses tethered on its verge, strode up onto the trampled mud and grasses of its top. There stood a mound ringed with spears and pikes. It was low and piled, not with the black cobbles of Orthanc's tortured bones that dotted the riverbed, but with white and red and buff. The smooth rounded granite that the Misty Mountains had thrusted high.

"Faramir?"

He turned, heart heavy, thinking of the many who had fallen in battle there, to see Éowyn touch small steeples of perched pebbles about the mound's east foot.

Folk, in passing, had added more here and there, honouring their Prince's sacrifice. Before their simple testimony, she fell to her knees, keening and rocking, overcome by the knowledge of it.

_No hawk or horse. No harp or gold wine-cup. But reverence just the same._

He scrambled to close about her the wide circle of his arms.

"I can't. I can't." She had wished to sing but a cresting wave of grief now blocked up her throat.

 _Oh love_.

He pulled her up. The wind had dropped. Standing tall under the streaming sun, he held her, soothed her, and at last, to his own surprise, began to sing.

_Out of doubt, out of dark, to the day's rising; he rode singing in the sun. Over death, over dread, over doom lifted; out of loss, out of life, unto long glory sung.__

From another rite, for another King renewed, he pulled the unfamiliar words; felt a warm but rough baritone mellow as they flew. The notes came and filled his chest; filled the empty ford and trailed away until there was naught but sun and a gentle rain of tears.

 _Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?_ _  
_ _Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?_

They stood and breathed, heard the quiet bird-song come back, the muffled burble of the river. From the east there was the barest flash of silver-gold-the escort, at attention, had dipped their spears.

And now it was time to go.

They both knelt, plucked a mottled pebble from below a mossy ledge and set them, with sprays of cream-gold aster, upon the mound. Hers was white. And his was red.

As Faramir began to lead the pair of mounts toward the riverbank, Eowyn took Wynfola's reigns and laid a small proud hand upon his arm.

'What of you? And Boromir?'

_My brother, I do not hear your voice, but my heart speaks with you even here._

He reached a hand to cup her cheek, to warm the tracks of her tears still shining silver on her fair face, marvelling anew, for he had not thought it possible to find he loved her even more.

She thought of _him_ even amidst her grief.

"When the time is right I know where we shall go, but that is a different road."

And they turned away. And he heard not the bright, sweet chirp of the meadowlark, but white gulls calling clear over a foaming sea.

~~~000~~~

East of Tolfalas's low mountain spine, before the River's mouth, there lay a sea passage dredged by Númenóreans of old when the tall Sea Kings brought trade and tribute from new found shores. Now its peaks were softer, smoothed by Belegaer when the great wave rose up to drown far Westernesse, but the channel was still sound and a busy harbour clung to its rocky shore. There the galleys that traversed Belfalas Bay rubbed shoulders with fishing boats like sleek sea-otters bobbing in the waves. Above, a myriad of kittiwakes whirled like white leaves below the sun, and away, south and east to far uncharted shores, the green-silver sea rippled in long unending lines.

Upon the deck of a grand new barque, the Lady of Ithilien set her hands upon smooth gunwale and breathed deep of the moist, heavy air, marveling again that in a few short months so much of her world was new.

In spring there had been wide plains of wheat, white high Starkhorn, and willows waving above Entwash's mirror pools, but by summer's end she had learned to traverse other maps. Minas Tirith's grand, gleaming thoroughfares. The pine and tumbling hills about Emyn Arnen's sweet-scented, growing garden. Spice and spires of poplar trees and grape vines about Cobas' shore and the narrow alleys of Dol Amroth's docks. So many and so wondrous. New vistas that felt strange and thrilling, and easy all at once; cherished now that she had begun to know them well.

And also another, more unexpected geography.

 _Footprints upon the strand, shimmering beneath a silver moon. Fireflies and nightblooms and dance steps on a balcony while stars flowered in the sky.  
_  
Some of these new trails were lazy-made of endless winding staircases and bronze seaweed, wild herbs and sun-drenched picnic blankets, or the arc of a cushion amidst a morning melee. Some were more deliberate. The trail left by her husband's poetry as bright words skipped along her spine. The trace of his eager lips upon her trembling skin.

It had been his pity that first picked her up, drew her cautiously through this door, set hope to counter doubt, and with it challenged what she knew, or thought she knew, of love. So much, that Éowyn, a woman of warm high grass and endless sky, now fancied in the sea-roke she could feel Ulmo in her bones.

_Sand and streaming sun, a smile that was just for her._

Already she had learned to read the map of _him_. For a time that summer, Faramir's fair, grave face had blurred in Dol Amroth's gentle air. Softened. Shone even with unguarded delight. But now, with every league away a stiffness was creeping in, and she had come to understand that love and grief were twins. Places none could know until they reached them; undiscovered countries both veiled but found through private ritual, performed alone.

They stood with hands laced upon the starboard rail, slim gold bands sun-kissed, enjoying the last days of unfettered, flying happiness, and he grew quieter and more restless.

A hand rubbed unseeing at a scar. Callused fingers carded endlessly through tousled hair. A muscle jumped in his cheek. Faramir searching the changing shoreline constantly, for fear that he might miss the place, though instinct said that he should know it.

At last, he bid the Captain stop.

"Here."

In the braids of Anduin's waning delta there was a salt map, limned by the sturdy plants of the brackish river mouth- sawgrass and needlerush, bright oxeye and twining rose mallow—giving way to lavender and thrift and cordyline. The sea-channels wove and wended, streamed in twining loops as endless as any of her people's famous knot designs. And at their end, the River rushed headlong into the wide arms of the sea.

The ship moored in a bay where the tide carved deeply into green high bank and shingled cliff; where they could row to a shore suffused with gentle beauty. Oystercatchers darted on the short stretch of damp gold sand. A pair of cormorants, still as statues, dried their glistening wings in a fitful, rising breeze.

It was lovely and perhaps the closest they could get.

Faramir hauled the little skiff tight in and led the way. They strode past clumps of waving marram to the base of the little cliff and began to clamber up. Éowyn followed curiously, watching his dark head turn left and right, seeming to choose footing and purchase at random until they gained some height.

At the top, at a crest of jutting limestone, she reached shy fingers out for his, wishing to anchor him, ground him, set a waypoint in this place as a tumult of emotions crested in his chest.

_Here. One stop on the path. Far, far down from a reed-choked riverbank on a blue-black winter's night._

The press of his fingertips was quick and light. It took them to the edge, looking out over the rolling gold and green with the ship fish leaping in the swell.

"This is, I think, the spot."

"Yes."

It felt giddy to lean, just a little, into the steadying wind; send spinning out into the blue the wreath she had made of laurel and bay for strength, white jasmine and rosemary for remembering. Simple and just right.

She turned to face the world, the wideness of the sea, and set her back against the welcome weight of his chest. Strong but aching arms enclosed her round.

This was the harder road. No surety of place, no certain bed when a warrior became one with the Sundering Sea. Behind, a shudder rumbled through him. The seaward wind swirled skirts and hair and the words that hung unspoken in the air.

 _A time for her to give to him_.

Eowyn breathed in, found notes for a sea-chant of an Elder day. Shyly begged from Imrahil. And Faramir had pretended not to hear.

_Far-off, far-off, with conches calling—lo! I stood in green sweet lands,  
And the meadows were about me where the weeping willows grew,  
Where the long grass stirred beside me, and my feet were drenched with dew.  
From the great grey waters heaving round the rocks the white seabirds flew,  
till the tides went out, the Wind lay down, and the sea music's rolling ceased.  
And I woke to silent caverns and gentle sands, and a song of lilting peace.  
_

The ancient lay coiled about them. Like smoke. Or spindrift. Each breath a refrain, a lament for a world one could not touch or ever truly know. Whither all a brother's love was bound.

When the last low note trailed away she felt Faramir's soft exhale and turned within his arms; searched his pale, pained face and her words were no more than a sigh.

"Though love yet mingles with greying grief, it grows the greater. I feel it. Waxing with each dawning day. Each twilight. Grief will wane. And peace will come. And memory will bring solace."

He nodded mutely, eyes brimming, but still the tears did not flow.

_Oh love._

She took his hand, opened the trembling fingers to place a small whorled shell upon his palm. A little thing. Pearl and coral pink. Precious with the mineral-sharp, tang of the sea.

And _there._

"I will not say, do not weep, for tears ever are a balm."

"I know."

The first salt-tracks glistened where they coursed along his cheeks.

Salt map. Heart map. Together, they stood and drew in great lungfuls of green air a while. Below Eowyn's hand the linen of Faramir's shirt was thin; enough she could feel the long slow steady thudding of his heart.

And the moment when the clear grey gaze bound to the farthest, unseeing shore, at last drew down.

"Thank you, min heorte," he said, and sighed and bent to claim a kiss.

"Now let us chart a path for home."

**Author's Note:**

> Faramir's ode is my own amalgam of Theodred's dirge sung at the eyot noted in UT and Theoden's lament from his funeral feast. Eowyn's lament is from JRR's Sea Chant of an Elder Day. I have combined lines that I felt reflected the setting, and changed some words for metre and impact.
> 
> To Altariel and Anna, my deepest thanks for their encouragement to tackle this and wisdom that the time to had to feel right. To Gwynnyd, Carawyn, Haarajot, Lucia, Lia, and Medea of GOI, thank you also for your support and comments. They mean so much.


End file.
